


Heavenly Peace

by jane_x80



Category: NCIS
Genre: Christmas Eve, Gen, Stargazing, Walks In The Woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 02:26:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12901977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_x80/pseuds/jane_x80
Summary: It is Christmas Eve, and Tony finds himself alone in the woods, gazing at the stars.ForDay 3 of the Happy Holidays Challenge on LiveJournal, the theme is Silent Night.





	Heavenly Peace

**Author's Note:**

> I highly recommend listening to [Silent Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOZwvRzPvz8) performed by Low while you read this.
> 
> And seriously, heed the warnings. There are no surprises. I am so, so sorry.

Tony DiNozzo lay as he’d fallen, flat on his back. At first there had been a lot of pain, and it had been uncomfortable on the ground. He could feel the rocks, lumpy earth, maybe tree roots, or whatever they might have been that were under him. But now, he was numb and he felt nothing. Not even pain.

He lifted a hand from where it had been pressing down on his side. It was still dripping with blood.

Yup. This was it for him. Unlike the rest of his team, he hadn’t taken the days off that they were given. What the hell was he going to do, putter around his lonely apartment by himself for days on end? He would end up hitting the scotch hard and he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to turn into his father. So he had traded shifts with Sullivan, who had wanted to go home to Minnesota to be with his family. Sullivan was young and had the kind of relationship with his parents that he actually missed them when he was away. Tony didn’t really know what that felt like, to miss a parent. Sometimes he missed his mother, but it wasn’t so much that it was her that he missed, but it was the idea of her. She had been such an erratic presence in his life before she’d died that he had vastly contradictory memories of her. And the idea of anyone missing Senior was completely laughable. So yeah. He didn’t miss his parents. He couldn’t miss what he’d never really had. So at the last minute, he’d agreed to switch with Sullivan, and that young agent would work New Year’s Eve, which Tony preferred to have off from a partying perspective anyway. At least New Year’s was a great time to get laid. Christmas was a time for him to stay home and lick his wounds, and New Year’s was a time to go out and get laid and ring in the new year. So he had been happy to give Sullivan a chance to go home to Minnesota and reconnect with his family. Go sledding or snowmobiling, or whatever it was people did in the frozen tundra. Tony and his liver thanked Sullivan for the opportunity to keep working through the holidays.

It was a skeleton crew at the Navy Yard the last couple days before Christmas. Tony didn’t mind it, it was nice to have the bullpen all to himself and sit and work on cold cases and random miscellaneous paperwork for the MCRT as well as for Sullivan. That agent needed some help organizing his paperwork, Tony shook his head. He had meant to sit the guy down in a couple of days and maybe teach him his system or something.

But that was a moot point now. Tony had been working on one of the cold cases assigned to Sullivan, and he’d found a lead. The problem was, because it had been a skeleton crew manning the Yard the day before Christmas, everyone was out, away from their desks. Tony could have waited on it for someone to come back him up, but it was almost Christmas, so he had elected to follow up on the lead by himself rather than bother anyone else with it. Everyone was marking time before they could leave work anyway. So he’d gone alone and knocked on the witness’s door, asked a couple of leading questions, and somehow, he’d been subdued from behind. A hard whack on his head by some unknown assailant, possibly an accomplice. He’d been hit with something made of metal, probably, because his head had been bleeding when he came to. He woke up and found that he was in a clearing in a forest. He stood up and turned around. He felt for his sidearm – empty holster. His phone wasn’t in his pocket either.

Footsteps from behind. He turned and then shots were fired and here he was on the ground. Bleeding out. No phone. No gun. No way to contact anyone. And now, he didn’t even have the energy to try to crawl his way out of this.

It was the end of the road for Tony DiNozzo. If he was lucky, someone would find him when they went hiking in the spring or the summer. And by then, what with the scavengers and the environment, Ducky would have to identify him by his dental records. No one was coming for him this time. He felt a pang of sorrow for Ducky, to have to identify another friend by their dental records. He knew that Ducky had been greatly disturbed when he had had to try to identify Tony’s supposed remains after Kort had blown his car up all those years ago, at the end of the La Grenouille fiasco.

There was no way anyone would know where to look for him as he didn’t even leave a note on his desk to let anyone know where he went. And nobody would even be looking for him until Gibbs and his team came back two days after Christmas. There was no way Tony would still be alive in three days, assuming that Gibbs would even find him right away.

He sighed.

It was quiet out there in the winter. No crickets or bats or owls to break the silence. It was a silent night. The quietest night in Tony’s memory, without the sounds of the city. There was absolute silence. And the stars were bright in the sky.

It was nice that he could no longer feel the cold or the pain. It was actually kind of pleasant now. To be alone with his thoughts, with the night sky so clear and the stars lighting it up, without the lights of the city to dim them. It was incredibly peaceful. It made him regret never being interested in constellations. It would have been nice to be able to identify a constellation and let it guide him to wherever it was he was headed.

Tony didn’t even fight it when he started to become sleepy. Chances of him waking up if he went to sleep? Zero.

But it was OK. He’d survived the plague, other gunshots, knife wounds, bombs, serial killers. All kinds of other things that should have taken his life. He’d cheated death plenty of times. The only person who’d given death the slip more times than he was Gibbs, and he knew that he couldn’t steal Gibbs’ thunder and survive this one. He smiled to himself at the thought of Gibbs being upset at him stealing his thunder. Ah, Gibbs. His boss was definitely one of a kind.

Tony was surprisingly calm though. He was OK with death now. He’d expected his life to flash before his eyes or something like that, wasn’t that what books and movies said happened? But that didn’t happen. He just felt warm and at peace.

Besides it was Christmas Eve. He wasn’t alone in his boxers, drinking scotch right out of the bottle, drunk out of his mind and deeply mired in depression, wondering what he’d done with his life to always, always be alone at Christmas. Instead, he was outside, in the cold, crisp, fresh air, communing with nature, with the stars so unnaturally bright in the sky, and Tony wasn’t sad or depressed or lonely. How could he be with the majesty of the heavens right above him?

Yeah, this was infinitely preferable.

Tony smiled. He wondered if he was in Rock Creek Park, where so many of their victims had been found. The irony. He was going to die alone, in the woods, on Christmas Eve, on a _silent night_ filled with stars. Hell, his own death scene even had a soundtrack.

He thought he could hear the strains of Silent Night now, two voices, one male and one female, accompanied by a lonely guitar, the music stately and somehow sad and mournful. But he was so very sleepy now. His brain was muzzy.

His eyelids were heavy. Despite wanting to stay awake to enjoy the stars, and the faint sounds of Silent Night echoing in his head, he let his eyes close and he drifted off.

_Sleep in heavenly peace._

**Author's Note:**

> I know *ducks* I am so, so, sorry. The music made me do it! I found Low's performance of [Silent Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOZwvRzPvz8) sad and mournful and this is what the muse came up with.
> 
> And I promise this is the least happy one I'm writing for the challenge. :D
> 
> Sorry again...
> 
> <3  
> -j  
> xoxo


End file.
